Prayer Source Materials

See also the very useful volume, Making Prayer Real: Leading Jewish Spiritual Voices on Why Prayer is Difficult and What to Do about it. Rabbi Mike Comins. Woodstock, VT: Jewish Lights, 2010. Additional related resources.

Psalms for a New Day (1994) and Flames to Heaven (1998). Debbie Perlman. Wilmette, IL: RAD Publishers. Valuable resources, especially for those seeking their own or a loved one’s healing or those working in health professions. Very hard to find now in print, sadly. But some of Perlman’s poems can be found at RitualWell.org and other sites. (I think RAD was her synagogue’s self-publishing effort; in any case, they have not published anything else and appear to no longer exist.)

The resources below are intended to become an easier way to reference materials as “Prayer Links,” with notes on prayer-related content in the weekly portion, grow.

Open Siddur Project

…Our mission is to liberate the resources of Jewish spiritual practice through the digitization of printed work in the Public Domain and to advocate for the appropriate licensing or re-licensing of Jewish spiritual resources under standard free culture licenses.

To this end, the Open Siddur Project is creating an online workshop for crafting, publishing, and printing Jewish prayer books (siddurim). Our intention is that the development of a free web application and digital library of liturgical texts (historic and contemporary, familiar and obscure) will preserve the diversity of Jewish traditions worldwide, encourage creative engagement and understanding in Jewish spiritual practice, and provide an urgently needed resource for Jews sharing and crafting new siddurim….

There is a technical aspect to the work — involving making Hebrew script editable, etc. (unlike proprietary programs, like Davka) — which I don’t entirely understand, including a “tech-talk” subgroup for those more code-oriented. But no technical ability beyond being able to upload a file — or find someone who can do it for you — is required to share prayer-related material.

Check out my first contribution, just as an example. Aharon Varady at Open Siddur added the Hebrew text, where quoted, for me.